


Defeated

by ozuttly



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Character Death, M/M, Thoughts of Suicide, lots and lots of angst, oh and angst, slight spoilers for season 8
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-17
Updated: 2013-02-17
Packaged: 2017-11-29 15:33:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/688561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ozuttly/pseuds/ozuttly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Why did you kill James Novak, Dean?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Defeated

When Special Agent Jennifer Wilson sits across from Dean Winchester in the interrogation room of a small town local police department, she isn’t sure what she was expecting. Maybe some of the cockiness that he showed in the confession tape from Baltimore, maybe worry for his brother, maybe anger and irritation at being arrested in a small hunting shack just out of town. What she finds is none of that.

What she finds is a man who looks purely and utterly defeated. He looks tired, far older than his thirty-four years, and barely even looks up when she pulls out her chair and sits down. He’s been in custody for seven hours now, although this is the first time an FBI agent has been in to speak with him. There’s been no escape attempts, which is strange, but stranger still is the fact that they haven’t yet found his brother.

“So, Dean, you’re alone this time.” She starts casually, and he lifts his eyes to look at her, eyes her up, and then leans back and starts to stare at the table once more. There’s not even a grunt of acknowledgement, and she frowns. She had been expecting a wise-crack. That was why they’d sent her in – Winchester was a known playboy, he flirted with women, he cracked jokes, he made light of the situation and bid his time until his little brother managed to rescue him.

Something had happened recently that had changed all that. He hadn’t bothered to resist arrest, and while he refused to give up any information on his brother’s whereabouts, he had seemed to accept his fate rather than anything. There was speculation that it had something to do with the latest murder, something to do with the ritualistic set-up of the body, maybe something to do with the victim himself.

“You two haven’t been getting along lately?” She tries, and the corner of his mouth twitches minutely downwards.

He doesn’t answer.

It’s highly unlikely that he doesn’t know his brother’s whereabouts. The Winchesters worked as a team; they always had in the past, and there was no reason to suspect that this time was any different. But, if it was, if Dean did this alone, then they needed to find out why. What was different this time?

The victim wasn’t the usual, that was for sure. Dean Winchester had killed young women in St. Louis, and while religious undertones weren’t uncommon in the Winchester case, this was the first they’d seen with this particular pattern to it.

She frowns for a moment, then opens up the case file and places it on the table in front of her, sliding two pictures towards the man opposite her. She watches his face for a reaction, a little surprised when she sees honest guilt there. Guilt and regret, and a tiny hitching noise in his throat that he tried to cover up before he quickly turned away.

He felt guilty. In all the other times he’d been in police custody, he’d never shown this reaction.

This case was definitely different.

Wilson glanced down at the images herself, even though she’d already seen them several times. The slightly scruffy man in the cheap suit and trench coat was sprawled out on his back, and burned into the ground around him was an image of wings. Almost like an angel.

“Why did you kill James Novak, Dean?” She asks, rather than continuing the questioning about Sam’s location. Something about this man had drastically caused Dean Winchester to change his behaviour, and she needed to find out what. If she could, then it might lead them to the younger brother.

“Jimmy,” he corrects her automatically, clearing his throat as though he were afraid that if he didn’t, some emotion he didn’t want would end up coming through. “His name was Jimmy. And I didn’t kill him.”

She raises an eyebrow at that. Calling the victim by his nickname (actually correcting her, at that) meant that they had known one another. James Novak had disappeared from his home years ago, leaving behind his wife and child, gone completely off the grid. Nobody had known what had happened to him and had presumed him dead until Dean Winchester was found with his corpse. His wife claimed he’d been hearing voices before he left, that he claimed to have been visited by an angel. It was possible that he’d met up with the Winchesters at one point, maybe become a partner?

“Dean, you were found sitting next to his body with the knife that killed him. The only fingerprints on it were his and yours, and he couldn’t have stabbed himself, not with that amount of force from that angle.”

Dean blinks as though what she’s saying is confusing to him, but then he smiles. It was a sad, broken smile.

“Oh, right. No, I killed him. I’m not denying that. I just didn’t kill Jimmy. Jimmy’s been dead for years. Never really knew what happened to him. Cas never actually told us the details,” he explains, and that was new information.

“Who’s Cas?” She asks, and Dean snorts some, rolling his shoulders.

“Even if I told you, you wouldn’t actually believe me. Because you guys think I’m crazy, right? Me and Sam.”

It seemed like she’d asked the wrong question, and he’d clammed up.

“I’m not here to tell you you’re crazy, Dean,” she says, and he rolls his eyes at her, but he seems tired. Seems exhausted, and after a moment he just slumps into the chair.

“Doesn’t matter anyways. Cas is gone, and he’s not coming back this time,” he speaks quietly, defeated, and she says nothing as she waits for him to go on. “I was supposed to make sure he was ok. I know he could take care of himself, that he could take care of all of us, but I still… I should have known that something was wrong. I should have…” He trails off, closing his eyes.

“He was my best friend,” he says at last, sounding so utterly broken that Jennifer has to wonder if friendship was the only thing between the two of them.

“And this… Cas, he was related to Ja— Jimmy Novak?” She presses, and Dean glances up at her, a snort of laughter rising from his chest.

“I guess you could say that. Jimmy was Cas’ vessel.” He offers no more explanation.

“Vessel?” She decides to prod him a little bit, but whenever there was talk about vessels, it could never be good. “Like with demonic possession?”

She knows she said the wrong thing when he slams his hands down on the table in frustration.

“Cas wasn’t a demon!” He snaps, and she nods her head, goes along with it to get him to calm down, to get him talking again. He hands his head and exhales. “He was an angel.”

Suddenly it all makes sense. How Novak had been hearing voices before he disappeared, how he’d claimed that an angel had visited him. She mentally made a note to try google later and see if there were any angels whose names could be shortened to ‘Cas’.

“So… You killed an angel?” She asks next, and it sounds so ridiculous to her own ears that she has to fight to keep her voice level. He looks up at her, and his upper lip curls in something like disgust.

“Yeah, I killed an angel. Doesn’t matter, already know I’m going back to hell when I die,” he spits, and then bows his head again. “They’re not really all that, you know? Angels. Most of them are dicks. Cas was different.”

“He was your friend.” She fills in, and he nods. “You cared about him.” He tenses up for a moment, and she hopes she hasn’t pushed him too far, but then all of his muscles loosen and it looks like he just collapses into the chair as he nods once more. “So why did you kill him, Dean?”

He’s silent then, and he almost looks like he’s going to cry. It’s hard to remember that this is the man who cockily laughed off a confession in Baltimore, who responded to every interrogation with either tight-lipped silence or arrogant jokes.

Wilson bites her lower lip for a moment, then reaches out and places one hand on his. He almost jumps at the contact, and she makes her voice as soft and gentle as she can when she speaks next.

“Dean, if you cared about him, why did you kill him?”

He looks up at her then, and the sadness in his eyes is almost tangible.

“Because he asked me to. He said…” his voice hitches and for a second she thinks he’s going to sob. “He said he was dangerous, that he couldn’t trust himself. He said that the other angels, they did something to his brain, made it so he couldn’t control himself, and—” He breaks off and looks away, clenching his fists.

“He killed Sam,” he says finally, and his voice is so rough that it sounds like he’d been eating sandpaper. “He didn’t want to, but they made him do it. He said he couldn’t stop himself, said he was gonna hurt more people, and that he couldn’t deal with that, not after everything else. He couldn’t do it himself, so he asked me to do it for him.”

Wilson folded her hands on the table in front of her, watching Dean’s face. They hadn’t found Sam Winchester’s body, so it was possible that this was a lie, but it didn’t seem like it. If anything, Dean looked exactly like he’d lost everything he had in the past twenty four hours.

“You let yourself get caught,” she says, and he looks up at her with the worst fragment of a smile she’s ever seen.

“Can’t kill myself. Promised Sammy I’d never do something like that. But I figure I’m on the top of the FBI’s most wanted list. You guys find me, I’m bound to get the death penalty, aren’t I?”

Wilson frowns, but she nods her head. It’s highly probable, unless the jury are incredibly sympathetic. Dean seems to relax at that, closing his eyes.

“That’s all I’ve got to ask, then,” she says as she stands, grabbing the file and leaving with a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. When she goes back to speak to her superior and the local law enforcement with news of her findings, she feels heavy and weighted down.

“You can take the guard off the door,” she says first. “That man isn’t going to even try to escape.”


End file.
